- Kids Love Them! These books are so much fun to read! I had my entire class of 1st graders hooked on reading with these books. They enjoyed hearing the stories, talking about what was happening and the characters, and always wanted to have them in their book boxes.
- Morals These books have great messages inside about friendship! Elephant and Piggie are best friends, and they learn a lot about what it means to be a good friend in these books! These stories are great conversation starters.
- Readability Not only are the themes appropriate for primary students, the words are also appropriate for 1st graders to be reading! These books have a lot of sight words, and each page has a small amount of text. All of the text is written in speech bubbles which makes it easy to know who is talking and fun to see the conversation. So much of the story is told in the pictures!
- The Illustrations! The illustrations in these books are priceless! They capture the story line as well as the emotions of the characters. Kids can know the whole story without reading a word, which helps build confidence when they are reading. It is also a great mentor text for adding details to pictures (action lines, speech bubbles, facial expressions and more)
- Emotions The characters feel real emotions. You can see it on their faces as well as in what they say. It helps students be empathetic and understand how certain actions make the characters feel.
- Punctuation These books are filled with questions marks and exclamation marks. Students can practice their fluency by appropriately saying what is in the speech bubbles. With a little instruction, they will adjust their intonation to accurately say how it is written in the text.
- Font This book also has a variety of all capitals text, small text, and big text. They could not believe that I raised my voice so high, but once they understood that the book indicates to say it loudly with all capitals, then they love to copy. They are generally good at pretend screaming in a 6 inch voice.
- Partner Reading These books are great for reading with friends. The different colored speech bubbles practically make it reader's theater. Each student can choose a character and they can act out the dialogue with expression. I got my cousin hooked on these books and now he won't stop asking to read them- "Do you want to be Elephant or Piggie?"
- Metacognition Although these books can be read by 1st graders, there is also a lot of thinking to do! "Uh oh, where do you think he's going?" "What will he do?" "Why do you think he is sad?" "Look at her face, do you think she liked that? What is she thinking?"
- Story Structure These books also uphold great story structure. There is always a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can find cause and effect, problem and solution, somebody wanted but so, and all the elements to a story.
Enjoy!
